“Model Refugees”: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question of Palestine

This paper examines the Cold War migration of Vietnamese refugees to Israel-Palestine in the late 1970s. In June 1977, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin granted asylum to sixty-six Vietnamese refugees as his first official act in office, citing parallels with the plight of Jewish Holocaust refugees three decades earlier. Two more groups of Vietnamese refugees would follow, bringing the total population of resettled Vietnamese Israelis to 366 by 1979. This case marks the first time that Israel offered asylum and eventual citizenship to non-Jewish subjects. Furthermore, the case remains an exception to Israel’s strict asylum policy, which continues to displace and dispossess native Palestinians, as well as turn away asylum seekers from Eritrea, Sudan, and Syria. I argue that Israel resettled Vietnamese refugees in order to depict itself as a multicultural nation, directing attention away from the contemporaneous displacement of Palestinian refugees. Israel did so to align itself with the United States in the emerging Cold War order. Within Israeli society, Vietnamese Israelis are positioned as “model refugees”: refugees that are not seen to disrupt the existing social order. This stereotype of Asian docility in turn codes non-Vietnamese subjects—primarily Black and Arab asylum seekers, as well as displaced Palestinians—as always already suspect. Such a conception of “model refugees” resonates with the racialization of Asian subjects in the North American context as “model minorities.” This paper ends with some reflections on how Vietnamese Israelis challenge their racialization as “model refugees,” pointing towards potentials for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.